Translation Effects: Language, Time, and Community in Medieval England (Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture) - Tapa dura

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Mary Kate Hurley is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Ohio University.

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This study reinterprets a central feature of medieval textual production: translation. It demonstrates that medieval texts—from the ninth century to the fifteenth—often leave observable traces of the translation process that reveal their imagined political, cultural, and linguistic communities. I term these traces “translation effects” and argue that their presence creates imagined textual communities that are temporally heterogeneous and geographically expansive. Such effects have a range of ramifications for the communities they help create. Sometimes translation effects lend authority to a translation, such as when the Old English Orosius invokes the voice of the historian Paulus Orosius to both describe and judge past cultures. In other moments, they imply an audience linked not by time or location but rather by access to shared cultural knowledge, such as Ælfric of Eynsham’s Lives of the Saints’s repeated references to stories already known from Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica. These indications of the work of translation give insight into the way medieval readers and writers pursued their craft. By examining translation effects, modern scholars can better understand how medieval translations imagine community.

Considering translation effects calls attention to a fundamental difference between modern and medieval translation. Scholars of modern translation have long acknowledged what Lawrence Venuti calls the illusion of the translator’s “invisibility.” This invisibility is achieved via “transparency,” the characteristic of translations that masks their translators’ role in creating them. Yet according to Venuti, invisibility also enacts a form of violence: domesticating translations transforms the foreign into the familiar and in so doing elides fundamental differences between cultures and silences minority voices. Moreover, “no translation can provide direct or unmediated access to the source text,” no matter how transparent the translator attempts to make their work.

But transparency was not necessarily a virtue for many medieval translators. In fact, many of them actually celebrated the visibility of translation, transmission, and the reception of stories from other times, places, and languages. For example, take Chaucer’s avowal of fidelity to his auctor Lollius in Troilus and Criseyde. Much critical ink has been spilled over the identification of Lollius, the probability that Lollius did not exist, and the possibility that his invocation may be meant to obscure Chaucer’s reliance on Boccaccio for his narrative. Yet as Bella Millett observes, despite Chaucer’s deferral to Lollius, he still creates an author-figure with whom modern readers might feel familiar. Moreover, the author that Chaucer creates in his fiction is also self-consciously positioned as a translator.

In fact, Chaucer explicitly refers to his method of drawing on Lollius’s work as that of transferring a narrative between “tonges.” Regardless of whether Lollius is actually fictive, Chaucer deploys a modesty topos that foregrounds not his invention but rather the words of his auctor. He asks his audience to “Disblameth me, if any word be lame, / For as myn auctor seyde, so sey I” (Book II, 17–18). While drawing attention to his auctor, Chaucer also highlights translation: “No sentiment I this endite / But out of Latyn in my tonge it write” (Book II, 13–14). The act of translation becomes a figure for the kind of decentering of authority that Chaucer asks the reader to accept. Alongside a theory of authorship, we see a theory of the translator emerge in these lines: a figure who attempts to claim his own invisibility even as he alerts readers to his presence.

A central goal of this monograph is to demonstrate that although such choices—which draw attention to the presence of translation—might seem jarring to a modern audience, they perform important cultural work in medieval texts. Translation effects foreground translation as an act even when they do not technically perform it. They are not aberrations affecting a translation’s quality, however, but moments of literary invention that imagine new textual communities.